


the sun that's setting in the east

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 23:13:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11793438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: She can do anything. She can do anything, anything.Which means, of course, that none of it matters.(Rachel Duncan, after the end.)





	the sun that's setting in the east

**Author's Note:**

> Translation into Russian available [here](https://ficbook.net/readfic/6174815).

She tries Zurich first. Helena and Sarah come stumbling out of the DYAD building, each of them holding a child, and six hours later Rachel walks into the Toronto International Airport and tries Zurich.

She really does try it. She walks along the canals. She buys ice cream, just because no one can stop her from doing it. No one can stop her from doing anything. One night she gets blackout drunk and brings someone home from a bar and doesn’t even put their hand around her throat. She can do anything. She can do anything, anything.

Which means, of course, that none of it matters.

Rachel wakes up at noon. Rachel goes to bed at noon and wakes up at dawn. Rachel spends an entire day not sleeping, just wandering in circles around the city – to the point where her leg shrieks at her, and she has to sit down on the ground. People look at her but they only see her eye patch. They don’t even recognize her face. None of it matters at all.

In a sterile building she lets doctors measure her for a glass eye, and she realizes – suddenly – that she could weep. She could say _I hate this, I hate doctors, I hate tests, I hate having you near my eye socket again and again._ She could slap them. She could walk out.

Rachel watches her hands intently to see if they start picking at her thumbnails. They do not. The doctors give her the glass eye and she puts it in her socket and nothing changes. She buys a train ticket and goes to Helsinki.

* * *

_Dear mother,_

_Did you know that this is one of the few countries in the world that completely lacks my siblings? They used to live here, you know. But I burned them all out. Now it’s only me._

* * *

In Helsinki, Rachel stops dyeing her hair for the span of a month before the sight of herself in the mirror drives her to a shaky, nauseous panic attack. She sits on the floor of her bathroom with her legs folded to her chest and closes her eyes and weeps. She weeps and weeps and for a moment – one that hangs dizzy, like she’s leaning over a pit – she doesn’t know any reason to stop. Without the weight of cameras or expectations, she cannot understand why she should stop crying.

Eventually the tears pass. Strange. She didn’t know that tears stopped if you cried for long enough.

* * *

She gets in the habit of writing to Sarah. Once, she is stupid enough to buy a postcard and put Siobhan’s address on it. _Sarah: What happened when you stopped running? Are you happy now? Do you ever miss it? The fear, I mean. Do you miss it?_

Helsinki, like Zurich, is not lacking in canals. Rachel rips the postcard into pieces and throws them in, watches the word _fear_ sink and bloat and melt away into pieces. She sits by the edge of the water for a long time; it’s only once the sky gets dark that she realizes she’s waiting for all of her words to come back to her.

They don’t come back. Rachel sits cross-legged on the edge of the canal and listens to people live their lives around her. They chatter in Finnish about their lives – dates, tests, loves, losses. Rachel learned Finnish so that, when it came time to pick Finnish monitors, she could be involved in the process. Rachel learned Finnish for her sisters. Now she has no sisters, and so the language on her tongue is lacking in point.

She gets cold eventually. The skin on her arms goosebumps. She can’t help but feel that if she waits for long enough, someone will come and sit down next to her. Rachel closes her eyes and imagines all her old ghosts coming back, sitting on either side of her – understanding that she’s one of them, now. Forgiving her. Letting her forgive them. When she opens her eyes again she notices two things. The first: her vision is blurred from tears. The second: she is leaning forward towards the canal water.

“No,” she says, and her voice is a rasp. It’s the first word she’s said in—

Well. Quite some time.

“I don’t think so,” Rachel says, and she stands up and puts her back to the water again.

* * *

_Dear mother,_

_I have to construct some sort of life for myself, don’t I. I don’t know how to do it. All of the others did it themselves, but my path was always preordained – how do I now begin the process of something I should have learned to do years ago? I was taught so many things. This I do not know._

_Dear mother,_

_I don’t understand how to do my own laundry. Isn’t that terrible._

_Dear mother,_

_I walk into the bookstore and pick up the first book I see, every time. I think I’ve bought the sixth Harry Potter book. It makes absolutely no sense. I’m reading it anyways. Isn’t that funny? Isn’t it strange to be in the middle of someone else’s story, and not already know it by heart?_

* * *

Helsinki goes better. Rachel folds up her last name and puts it in the bottom of her suitcase and is just Rachel, now, who could be anybody. She lets her arms freckle in the sun. She tries laughing, once, at something she thinks is funny. She tries thinking that things are funny. She gets a Netflix account. Months pass.

One day she looks at herself in the mirror and sees someone else’s laugh lines around her eyes. Someone else’s freckles. Lisa or Stephania or Carly and she is gripping on the edge of the bathroom counter, she is shaking.

“ _Duncan_ ,” she says. “My name is Rachel Duncan. Seven seven nine aich four one.”

A woman looks back at Rachel from the mirror. Could be any woman. Rachel looks at the razor-sharp edges of her own hair until her eye blurs, but she still doesn’t recognize herself.

“Rachel,” she whispers. “Rachel Duncan.”

It sounds like begging.

She refuses to sit on this same bathroom floor and cry, again, so she doesn’t. She lets her white-knuckle grip on the counter hold her up; her spine can’t manage it on its own. She shakes.

“I hate you,” she whispers in the vague direction of her knuckles. “It’s your fault I’m like this. I could have been anyone, and now I am just _this_. And it’s _your fault_.”

She looks back up to the glass, venomous. Her reflection glares back at her. It mouths: _I know_. It does not say _I’m sorry_.

* * *

So of course she goes back to Toronto. She flies coach for the third time in her life. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, Dumbledore dies; Rachel closes the book and looks out over the sleeping passengers in the cabin. _I am not going to cry_ , she thinks, and she doesn’t. She opens the book and turns back a few pages, to where the man is alive. When she turns forward he dies again. She turns back and forth and marvels at it: how easy it is to revive him.

She still doesn’t know how Westmorland died. Sarah never told her; she only said _he’s dead_ and stomped off to go do – something heroic. Something brave. _Sarah:_

But what would she say.

_What does missing Siobhan feel like. When you miss your parent, and you know that they are your parent, and you know that they loved you very much and were distraught to leave you. You found her body, I heard. What was it like when you saw it. When you knew she was dead and it wasn’t your fault. Sarah:_

She opens the book back up. The man teeters on the edge of the tower, and Rachel pushes him over again with her fingertips.

She eats the packaged peanuts, just because she can. They taste awful: artificial sweetness, overwhelming salt. She eats the entire bag and then licks her fingers.

* * *

So she goes to Toronto. So she walks back into the empty, boarded-up shell of DYAD and takes her own file. So she takes everyone else’s files too, because she can.

So she rides the elevator up to her office. So she stands there.

So she misses it. All of it. Of course she does. Do you blame her?

* * *

In Toronto, Rachel rents an apartment in a part of town she has never been to. She makes her disastrous way through cooking chicken. She reads the second Harry Potter book, and a book of fairy tales, and the memoir of some comedian or another. She eats dinner alone. Every time a character describes happiness, she pauses and tries to fit it into her chest. No description fits. She doesn’t think she’s happy – but she doesn’t know what else she would be.

Rachel isn’t angry anymore. If she isn’t angry and she isn’t happy – what is she? Exhausted? Can you be nothing but exhausted for the rest of your life?

She reads fifty-seven pages of a book about vampires and then grabs the pages in one hand, rips them, and lets them fall to the floor. The sound is very loud in her empty apartment. The pages lie there on the floor and continue to not mean anything. Exhausted. That’s probably the word.

She leaves them there for four days. The pages. She keeps trying this: leaving her dishes unwashed (she has to wash them herself, now, and every time it is a fight to not remember washing the knife after—) (sometimes she does let herself remember the knife) (not often) (she is trying not to weep, these days) in piles on the counter, wearing the same clothing without washing it, refusing to make her bed. She wants to see if it will make her feel something; mostly it doesn’t. Rachel continues to feel what is probably exhaustion. At one point she hurls the book across the room and its spine snaps when it hits the wall and she feels – _oh_ – it’s gone. It’s all gone again, and she is completely alone.

 _I should buy a dog_ , she thinks, and the thought is so ridiculous that she leaves her apartment and walks around the block just to give herself something to do.

Above her: the stars. Distant through the city smog, but still there. _Sarah: Do you see them too? Sarah: Can you tell me the feeling that’s inside of your chest, and what you do with it? Sarah: Can I come see you? Sarah: Do you recognize yourself in the mirror every single time you look, and what does that feel like?_

_Sarah: Can you just tell me what it feels like? Can you make it into something I can understand?_

* * *

TO: mail@fdawkinsart.com

SUBJECT: Cosima’s cure

* * *

At nights, sometimes, Rachel closes all the curtains. She never used to do that before; she liked the city lights streaming in through the window, her own array of impersonal spotlights. Now when she closes all the curtains and turns off all the lights she is alone, for the first time in her life. She is completely and utterly alone.

She curls up to the light of her laptop and reads Rachel Duncan’s file. Rachel Duncan grows up. She is antisocial. She has psychopathic tendencies. She should be screened for autism spectrum disorder.

 _She’s lonely_ , Rachel thinks, but that isn’t in this file. It seems urgent that she point it out. Someone should know that this girl is lonely. But if it isn’t in here, was it real? Did it exist? Did she just make it up, because that was the story she wanted?

Rachel scrolls back and forth through Rachel Duncan’s file and watches her make and unmake herself over and over again. Man falls off a tower. Daughter, left behind, shivers and grows up to fill the lack of him. Man falls onto the tower in reverse. Daughter shrinks back to when she was young. The cycle continues for as long as Rachel wants it to. She plugs the drive into her computer and repeats it without cease. She falls asleep and dreams about all her ghosts rising out of the water; when she wakes she’s crying, and if she wants to she can just go back to sleep.

* * *

FROM: mail@fdawkinsart.com

SUBJECT: RE: Cosima’s cure

* * *

_Dear mother,_

_I’m nervous. Isn’t that strange._

And Rachel is putting on her makeup again. It’s been a while; she can almost pretend that she doesn’t remember how it goes. She dresses herself in black, to make it easier for everyone. She feels the strange and terrible sensation of her own heart rate increasing, just a little bit. She calls a car. She gets in a car. She listens to some generic pop hit that – horribly – she recognizes the words to. She watches Alison’s house get larger and closer until it is suddenly real.

Felix gets in the car. Rachel hands him the file.

None of it means anything.

And then they’re driving away, and Rachel closes her eyes and rests her forehead against the car window because she can do anything. She can do anything, anything. Anything except send this car away and go into that house, sit with her sisters around Alison’s kitchen table, ask them what they’re doing now that their stories are done. _Sarah: Will he even tell you where he got that file from. Sarah: Do you ever remember me. Sarah: If I called you and told you I had Kira hostage, would you be relieved? Would you be as relieved as I would?_

God, she can’t stop thinking about it. Walking inside. She has no idea what they’d even be doing in there – Helena is with the Hendrixes, probably, but are her babies there? What are their genders? Their names? Is Kira alright? If Rachel walked in there, would someone offer her something to drink? Would there be anything in that gesture besides pity, and could Rachel cling to it?

“Circle the block,” she says. Her voice doesn’t rasp, because she has had two conversations today. This is technically her third. Yusuf circles the block. Alison’s house is real again and then it is no longer real. She watches the vague sparking of some orange light in Alison’s backyard until it vanishes behind her. She says an address out loud. She closes her eyes, and the city passes her.

* * *

She sits down at the bar and the man she’s meeting turns to her and asks: “So, what do you do?”

“Survive, mostly,” she says, and takes a sip of her cocktail. Oh, too sweet. She can’t drink gin anymore – drinking two bottles to anesthetize the pain of self-surgery will do that – and she has been steadily working her way down cocktail menus. Not this one, though. Never again.

“I feel that,” he says, and laughs. Awkward husk of a sound. She can’t see him out of her glass eye, but she can imagine: the sweaty fold of his hands, the pure nervous wanting radiating from him in waves. Rachel can do anything, now. If she wanted to, she could put down this drink and turn to him and say: _There have been a number of men in my life. All of them were paid to report on me except one, and that one tried to choke me to death and then was shot by my sister’s mother. He killed her. My sister blames me for it. I think I might have loved him, but I don’t know if that was just blood loss from when I carved out my own eye. It was a camera, actually. My eye. A gift from my third father. What do I do now? I don’t know. I used to be someone but now I’m not anything. What do_ you _do? What is your name?_

“What do you do?” she echoes, and none of the rest of it. He tells her, and she keeps a smile on her face the whole time. She drinks and drinks until her mouth is a numb sweet shape that could press against his mouth. She could go home with him. They’d exchange numbers. They would date, holding hands, moving in together. Eventually Rachel would stop waking up in the middle of the night to reread her own file. Maybe someday she would be happy with this completely uninteresting man.

He touches her hand, at one point in the conversation. She lets him. Imagine if she poured the cocktail over her head and her whole head became sweet and numb enough for her to rest it on his shoulder. Imagine if, at the end of things, something in Rachel’s life could be easy.

* * *

She sleeps with him, because she doesn’t know what else to do. He gives her his number. She does not call it.

* * *

San Diego after midnight becomes an entire city of catcalls and drunken whoops. Rachel sleeps her way through the bars and the bars and the bars, the endless succession of bars. Women are more difficult to get and nicer to touch, but men are exactly the same and thus a comfort. During the day – if she is awake during the day – she wanders to the beach. She has seen the ocean before, surely. Probably when she was young. But: all of her videotapes are gone somewhere and so here, California, may as well be her first time at the beach.

She buys a taco. It’s awful. Guacamole all over her fingers; she licks it off, feels sand crunch between her teeth. So what is the point of any of this. She sits in the sand and watches her skin burn and doesn’t even mind it. _Sarah: Do you take Kira to the beach?_ Probably she does. She can see Sarah and Kira there, in her mind’s eye. She can see Kira running through the sand. When Rachel opens her eyes again she’s alone, and her hand is reaching for a friendship bracelet that is tucked deep away in one of her suitcases. She rolls her trousers up and walks so deep into the ocean that her bones go numb. The ocean laces seaweed around her ankles and then takes it away again.

A woman at a bar – drunk, more drunk than Rachel – bullies Rachel into writing her cell number on the soft skin of her wrist. Rachel, bemused, does it – and she calls. They walk along the beach. Rachel says: “My parents passed when I was a child. I’m estranged from my siblings.”

“Oh,” says the woman. “That’s awful.”

Rachel stops. The sunset bleeds red light into the ocean. “Yes,” she says. She exhales through her nose, watches the horizon, waits for the green flash. “You know,” she finds herself saying, “no one has ever told me that before.”

“Shit.”

Rachel exhales a breath that is almost a laugh. The sun touches the water. The world lights up and then it goes again.

* * *

TO: mail@fdawkinsart.com

SUBJECT: Sarah

* * *

(She deletes it before she can send it.)

* * *

A different woman is going on a road trip, and Rachel goes along. They dye her hair in a bathroom sink, with a kit from a drugstore. It comes out the wrong color. Rachel locks herself in a hotel bathroom and doesn’t open the door no matter how long the woman on the other side of it knocks. The two of them part ways near Santa Barbara, and Rachel gets her hair dyed professionally, and she exists again. She goes back to the water. She closes her eyes and listens to Kira, shrieking, running frantic and delighted towards the sea.

In Santa Barbara Rachel buys embroidery floss. She sits by the pool of her cheap hotel and tries to learn patience. Her fingers fumble. The first bracelet she makes is all knots, and the second, and the third. Eventually her hands learn. She ties the strings together, one by one.

Rachel stacks them on her right wrist. A ridiculous, helix-like twist of knots in shades of blood and crimson red. A dainty pattern of pink and white. One of her earlier, snarled mess of knots – white and black and red. A simple one in grey and blue and purple. Like storms. Like bruises. Like the skin under your eyes, when you haven’t slept in a long time.

She sends the email. She doesn’t get a response, no matter how many times she checks. She doesn’t know what colors to use for Charlotte, and she stares at the threads for a long time while her inbox continues to stay completely and utterly empty.

* * *

British spring: rain, mostly, but occasional bursts of cold sunshine. Rachel goes to Cambridge. She visits an emerging biotech company in a brand-new building; when she asks, politely, they tell her that the previous building was maybe twenty years old.

It was built in the early 1990s, then, she says.

Yes, they say. Why?

No reason, she says. She walks over the place where she lost herself. It’s all ash, now. It’s all gone. When Rachel goes back to her apartment she weaves herself a bracelet of grey and red and then she plugs her sink, fills it with water, and drops the bracelet in it to watch all the colors bleed out.

* * *

FROM: sarah_manning@gmail.com

SUBJECT: RE: Hello

* * *

Rachel Duncan stays in Cambridge for a long time. She walks streets that she can vaguely match to patterns from her own memory. She does not buy ice cream, or tacos, or candyfloss; she orders tea, letting her face settle into the frown it naturally moves towards all the time. She buys a copy of _The Island of Doctor Moreau_ and rereads it and finds, to her surprise, that she actually hates the story. In a brief moment of catharsis, she hurls the book across the room and watches it break against the wall.

There’s a new family in the house Rachel used to live in. They have a son and a daughter. Here is a mistake: Rachel introduces herself to them. _I used to live here. When I was a child_. The family invites her in for tea, and the little boy solemnly shows her his action figures. When it’s clear she doesn’t know what any of his stories mean, he drags her to the television so they can watch cartoons. His hands are jam-sticky. He sits in her lap like it doesn’t mean anything. His sister stares, earnestly, at Rachel’s eye. Rachel lets her do it. Onscreen the heroes all wear bright colors and the villains all wear black; it’s so easy to tell them apart. Rachel lets the children hold her hands and play with the friendship bracelets on her wrists.

“They’re for my sisters,” she says.

“You have a lot of sisters,” says the boy.

“Far more than that,” Rachel says. “These are only a handful.”

“How many?” says the girl.

“Two hundred and seventy-three,” Rachel says.

The boy’s face settles into a frown. “You’re lying,” he says. “No one’s mum could make that many babies.”

“We came from different mothers,” Rachel says, and from the corner of the room she can feel the sudden disappointed weight of Susan watching her. But Susan is dead, and Rachel – probably – isn’t. Rachel is probably alive. “But I promise I’m telling the truth.”

“You promise?” says the girl.

Rachel swallows. “Yes,” she says.

“That’s a big family,” says the girl thoughtfully. “I bet your ryunyuns are awful hard.”

Rachel closes her eyes and laughs. “You have no idea,” she says.

* * *

She gets a fish and the tank she buys for it is enormous. Huge. She fills it with fake plants and then buys another fish, and another, and none of them are alone. She drinks too much and presses her face to the glass of the fish tank to watch them not be alone in the bright glass world she has constructed for them. She touches her fingertips to the glass and they don’t even know her. She feeds them regularly. She controls whether they live or die. It’s like an experiment. Isn’t it like an experiment?

The family in Rachel’s old house invites her over for dinner, sometimes, and she goes. They think that she’s some sort of old-money eccentric – and they aren’t wrong, they’re more right than they know. When she asks, the mother gives her tips on how to get better at cooking chicken. Rachel admits that she’s not very good at it and then has to excuse herself to the bathroom for a moment to beat down the shrieking voice that tells her this is a weakness.

By the time her breathing has settled and her face is blank and she has opened the door again, the little girl is sitting outside. She’s brushing her Barbie doll’s hair out. She holds the doll out for Rachel to see. “She’s pretty,” the girl says. “Like you.”

“I’m not a doll, sweetheart,” Rachel says.

“I know,” says the little girl. “You’re a person.” She goes back to looking at the doll. Rachel touches her fingertips lightly to the girl’s shoulder, and walks back into the kitchen again. 

* * *

_Dear mother,_

_I know that Kira isn’t my daughter, but that doesn’t mean I can stop myself from thinking about her. I can’t help but wonder – again – how much you think about me. Do you ever? Or was I just a paycheck and a place to stay for nine months? If I found you, would you hold out your arms to me? Would you weep? Would you slam the door in my face?_

_If it was the latter, I think that would be the most certain guarantee that we’re family._

* * *

The bracelets on Rachel’s wrist fade – she wears them in the Cambridge rain, and they bleed along her wrist. It’s fine. She makes new ones. The weaves of string are tighter now. After incessant pestering, she makes two bracelets for the two children in their favorite colors. She makes a third bracelet and drops it in a mailbox without looking.

The fish get bigger. Their scales get brighter. It’s comforting, that she doesn’t need to name them; it’s comforting, that they in no way can ever love her back. She cares about them and it’s easy. They’ll die and they’ll never know her. She sinks love into them, just to see how it feels.

She drinks cheap wine with the couple in her old house. When Rachel touches the glass to her lips, her eye drifts to the corner of the room where she’d accidentally chipped the wall after an overzealous turn with an iron she’d been fetching for her mother. The chip is still there. She lets her eye drift back to the couple again, watches the lace of their hands between them on the couch.

“So,” says the woman. “What do you do?”

“Survive, mostly,” Rachel says. She swirls the wine around in its glass. She considers. “My previous employer,” she says, “was demanding to the point of intolerance. I’d prefer not to work again, if I don’t have to.”

“You were employed,” says the man with blank surprise.

“Yes,” Rachel says. “For twenty-six years.” She listens to their disbelieving silence and drinks more wine. “You’re welcome to not believe me, I know it’s a difficult story to swallow. But it is the truth.”

“Like your two hundred and seventy-three sisters,” says the woman.

“Like that.”

Their silence sours. Rachel could tell them, right now. She could throw herself at their feet, desperate to be believed; she could show them a print-out of Project Leda, she could show them Cosima’s Facebook page or Krystal’s Instagram account. She could drag the hard drive here and show them Rachel Duncan growing up at DYAD, lonely in a way that no one ever wrote down. They’d believe her then. And once they did: she could weep here, on this couch, talk about Susan and Ethan and Aldous and the man whose name was John. She could talk about Sarah. She could describe the dizzying weight of reaching the end of one’s tightrope and finding nothing on the other side but more land to walk on.

She finishes the wine. “I’ll be heading back, then,” she says, and puts the glass down. “Good night.”

They do not call for her to stay and tell the truth. Rachel’s shoulders are square and steady. She walks out into the dark, again, and again she tells herself she does not regret leaving them behind.

* * *

FROM: monkey_face_99@gmail.com

SUBJECT: Hi Auntie Rachel

* * *

“You have to feed them every day,” Rachel says, watching the children smear their sweating palms along the glass of the fish tank. It is nearly too big for the girl’s room; it takes up a whole wall, the closest thing to an open window she had had in quite some time. She watches the fish flick their bright tails in circles, completely ignorant and uncaring. As long as they continue to be fed, they won’t care who’s watching them through the glass. As long as their bright plastic world stays the same they won’t even care.

“What’re their names,” says the boy, brow furrowed in concentration.

“They don’t have any.”

“They don’t have _names?_ ” says the girl incredulously. The two children give her looks of bright, naive disgust. She bites her canines into the inside of her lip to keep herself from smiling.

“You’re welcome to name them,” she says. They all stand there as the children take in the weight of this responsibility, and then the girl taps her fingers against the bracelets on Rachel’s wrist.

“What’re your sisters’ names?” she says.

“Do you remember when you showed me your doll?” Rachel says. “Do you remember what you said to me then?”

“I don’t remember,” the boy says impatiently. “I want to name them Luke _Skywalker_.”

The girl looks at Rachel for a moment, and Rachel searches her eyes for a deep understanding that does not appear. The girl’s eyes are blank and beautifully young. She opens her mouth and says: “No we hafta name one _Leia_.” And then the children are bickering, and they have missed Rachel’s point completely.

Rachel folds her hands in front of her, hooks her thumb through Sarah’s bracelet. It is terrible, probably, that this feels like a gift. _Sarah: I could have let them take your personhood from you. See how I didn’t? See how this means something? See how I’ve grown?_ But this is a laughable offense, a pale shade of her life’s work of dehumanizing. She steps out of the room while the children are arguing, walks back into the living room.

“Do you need a ride to the airport?” says the father.

“No, thank you,” Rachel says. “I’ll be fine. I do appreciate it.” She stops in the doorway, resists the urge to reach out and touch the bones of this house one last time. “Thank you, by the by. I know my presence here has been…strange, but you have been very kind.”

“Of course,” says the mother, and pulls Rachel in and holds her. _Oh god_ , Rachel thinks, and holds her back. Her arms don’t quite know how to do it but she bends them into the approximate shape. Oh god. Oh.

“If you’re ever back in Cambridge, come visit,” says the father, and steps forward when the mother lets go to hold Rachel too. Brief, but real. Then they both let go. Rachel’s eyes are damp, and she hates herself, and she can carry that. Her shoulders are still square. She is standing on her own two feet.

“I will,” she says, and means it, and leaves.

* * *

_Dear mother,_

_Both of these words are more difficult than they should be. Dear. Mother._

_I’m coming to visit. I would say that I hope you don’t mind, but I know that you can’t mind anything anymore._

* * *

The plastic crinkles when Rachel puts the bouquet down on Susan’s grave. She stands there for a very long time, but no one comes walking up to say that they’re proud of her. No one puts their hand on her shoulder. No one is kind enough to lie to her about anything.

She crouches down in the cracked summer mud and puts her fingertips to Ira’s grave marker – just because she has never done it, just because she never thought of doing it before.

Oh. She’s crying, again. It really does keep happening. Here she is, crouched in the dirt, touching the slab of wood marking Ira’s grave, weeping so hard that her breath hiccups in her throat. She’s crying for both of them. She might – narcissistic – be crying for all the ways Ira reminds her of herself. She doesn’t really know. The tears keep happening to her, and it’s always so hard to figure out what they’re for. How do people do it?

Eventually the tears stop again. It’s hot on the island in the summer, and the water dries from her face before she can process that it’s there. She looks at Susan’s grave.

_Dear mother,_

_I like to think you’d be proud of me_.

This is not a letter to Susan. She knows that Susan wouldn’t be proud of her. She knows that nothing she did could ever make Susan proud of her. Rachel has always hated fighting losing battles. What is the point of fighting, if you’re going to lose?

She stands up, wipes the dirt from her skin, and heads for the mansion. Inside: shattered glass, ripped-apart taxidermy. This might have been the work of the man named John or it might have been the work of his monsters – who’s to say? She was outside of this story by then, she cut herself entirely out of it. She wanders through the house and reaches out her hands for love and can’t find it anywhere anymore.

In his desk drawer, the tablet is lying untouched. Rachel imagines dropping it on the floor and stomping on it, over and over, until the glass shatters – but doesn’t know why she would, what it would prove to any of her ghosts. So she closes the door again.

In the helicopter away from the island she feels – better. She doesn’t touch it too closely, in case it vanishes. They fly south. The sun sets outside, and Rachel holds her breath and waits again for the flash of it hitting the sea.

* * *

There are new flowers growing outside of the house. Daisies, poppies. Bright colors. They wave in the breeze as Rachel walks up to the front door, knocks.

“Oh,” she says, when the door opens. “You’ve grown.”

Kira smiles at her, chiding and amused. “Of course I have,” she says. “I’m gonna be taller than you, that’s what my mom says.”

“I’m sure you will be,” Rachel says. She folds her hands in front of her. She lets herself have one quick breath, and then she says: “May I come in?”

**Author's Note:**

> I used to be a darling starlet like a centerpiece  
> Had the whole world wrapped around my ring  
> I flew too closely to the sun that's setting in the East  
> And now I'm melting from my wings
> 
> 'Cause nobody seems to ask about me anymore  
> And nobody ever cares 'bout anything I think  
> And nobody seems to recognize me in the crowd  
> In the background screaming, "Everybody, look at me"
> 
> And I'm faded away, you know, I used to be on fire  
> And I'm faded away, you know, I used to be on fire  
> I'm standing in the ashes of who I used to be  
> And I'm faded away, you know, I used to be on fire  
> You know, I used to be on fire  
> You know, I used to be on fire  
> Well, I used to be on fire  
> You know, I used to be on fire  
> \--"Angel on Fire," Halsey
> 
> Thanks for reading! This fic sort of broke my heart to write, because I'm really not ready to say goodbye to Rachel in any capacity whatsoever. I hope this was as cathartic for you to read as it was for me to write. Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed. <3


End file.
